Whether you followed KubeCon in Austin, or SpringOne Platform in San Francisco, there were several announcements of interest last week – especially if containers are of interest to you. See the links below to learn more about the Open Service Broker for Azure, projects that are bringing DevOps capabilities to Kubernetes and serverless on Azure, and the updated Azure Management Libraries for Java. In addition, several storage-optimized and burstable VM sizes are now available in GA.
Compute
Announcing the Lv2-Series VMs powered by the AMD EPYC™ processor – Lv2-Series VMs are next-generation storage-optimized VMs powered by AMD’s EPYC™ processors to support customers with demanding workloads like MongoDB, Cassandra, and Cloudera that are storage intensive and demand high levels of I/O.
Announcing the general availability of B-Series and M-Series – Burstable VM sizes (B-Series) and the largest VM sizes available in Azure (M-Series) are now GA.
cloud-init for RHEL 7.4 and CentOS 7.4 preview – Now you can migrate existing cloud-init Linux configurations to Azure from other environments. cloud-init allows for VM customization during VM provisioning, adding to the existing Azure parameters used to create a VM.
Containers
Connect your applications to Azure with Open Service Broker for Azure – The Open Service Broker API is an industry-wide effort to meet that demand, simply and securely that provides a standard way to connect applications to services available in the marketplace.
Azure brings new Serverless and DevOps capabilities to the Kubernetes community – Learn about announcements made at KubeCon about more Kubernetes community projects and partnerships that extend what you can do with Kubernetes and Azure.
Java: Manage Azure Container Service (AKS) and more – The latest release of the Azure Management Libraries for Java (v1.4) adds support for Azure Container Service (AKS) and more.
Partners enhance Kubernetes support for Azure and Windows Server Containers – News about two new collaborations with Heptio (bringing Heptio Ark to Azure) and Tigera (Project Calico), as well as some progress we’ve made working with SIG Windows (Windows Server Containers support in Kubernetes 1.9).
Lift, shift, and modernize using containers on Azure Service Fabric – Learn about some of the container orchestration capabilities in Service Fabric along with a peek at what’s coming soon, such as updates to the Service Fabric Explorer UI.
Data
Resumable Online Index Rebuild is generally available for Azure SQL DB – Resume a paused index rebuild operation from where the rebuild operation was paused rather than having to restart the operation at the beginning, all while using only a small amount of log space.
Database Scoped Global Temporary Tables are generally available for Azure SQL DB – Global temporary tables for Azure SQL DB are stored in tempdb and follow the same semantics as global temporary tables for SQL Server; however, they are only scoped to a specific database and are shared among all users’ sessions within that same database.
HDInsight Tools for VSCode supports Azure environments worldwide – You can now connect HDInsight Tools for VSCode to all the Azure environments that host HDInsight services, including government and regional clouds.
Performance best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Learn about the categories of performance issues for an application or service using Azure Database for PostgreSQL service and how to resolve them.
#AzureSQLDW cost savings with Autoscaler – part 2 – In this continuation of the post from November, #AzureSQLDW cost savings with optimized for elasticity and Azure Functions – part 1, learn how to get the most from Azure SQL Data Warehouse with an Autoscale solution you can deploy.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service is generally available – Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service provides zero-touch device provisioning to Azure IoT Hub, and it brings the scalability of the cloud to what was once a laborious one-at-a-time process.
Microsoft IoT Central delivers low-code way to build IoT solutions fast – Build production-grade IoT applications in hours and not worry about managing all the necessary backend infrastructure or hiring new skill sets to develop the solutions with Microsoft IoT Central.
Other
Deployment strategies defined – An exploration of common deployment strategies, such as Blue/Green Deployment and Canary Deployment.
What’s brewing in Visual Studio Team Services: December 2017 Digest – Buck Hodges provides a comprehensive overview of recent VSTS updates, including Azure DevOps Project and hosted Mac agents for CI/CD pipelines.
Don’t build your cloud home on shaky foundations – Learn the six top design considerations you should consider when laying the foundational components for a structured governance model in Azure.
Bringing hybrid cloud Java and Spring apps to Azure and Azure Stack – At SpringOne Platform we announced improved support for Pivotal Cloud Foundry across Azure and Azure Stack, and unveiled three new products and updates to improve support for Java and Spring on Azure.
Control how your files are cached on Azure CDN using caching rules – Learn how you can control Azure CDN caching behavior by intelligently caching files on CDN edge servers located in various geographic regions with CDN caching rules.
Content
Azure Application Architecture Guide – An overview of the Azure Application Architecture Guide, which the AzureCAT patterns & practices team published to provide a starting point for architects and application developers who are designing applications for the cloud.
Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available – A free eBook written by developers for developers to give you the fundamental knowledge of what Azure is all about, what it offers you and your organization, and how to take advantage of it all.
Service Updates
- Media Services SDKs for Java and PHP support Azure Active Directory Authentication
- Automation runbooks available in action groups to take actions from alerts
- ClearDB pricing plans for MySQL discontinued from December 5
- Azure portal update for classic portal users
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Support for SQL Operations Studio
- GUID migration: Azure Redis Cache US Government
Azure Shows
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Azure Location Based Services – Chris Pendleton joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Azure Location Based Services, which is a portfolio of geospatial service APIs natively integrated into Azure that enables developers, enterprises, and ISVs to create location-aware apps and IoT, mobility, logistics, and asset tracking solutions. The portfolio currently comprises of services for Map Rendering, Routing, Search, Time Zones and Traffic. |
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Open Service Broker for Azure – In this episode, Sean McKenna shows Scott Hanselman the Open Service Broker for Azure, an easy way to connect applications running in platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to some of the most popular Azure services, using a standard, multi-cloud API. |
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Azure Availability Zones – Raj Ganapathy joins Scott Hanselman to discuss the new addition to Azure's resiliency offerings – Availability Zones. Azure Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region to help protect customers applications and data from datacenter-level failures with independent power, network, and cooling. |
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Azure Security Center, Suspicious processes and JIT access – Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management on the Microsoft Azure Compute team shares some of the coolest demos from his recent Microsoft Ignite talk to help manage your infrastructure in an easier way. In this episode he covers Azure security center enhancements, tracking suspicious processes with AI and Just-In-Time (JIT) access. |
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The Azure Podcast: Episode 207 – Functions & Serverless – In this special All-UK episode, Russell Young has an in-depth discussion with Christos Matskas, a Senior Azure PFE in the UK, about the growing popularity of serverless computing in Azure using services like Functions and Event Grid. |
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Cloud Tech 10 – 11th December 2017 – Kubernetes, cloud-init, Cloud Foundry and more! – Each week, Mark Whitby, a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft UK, covers what's happening with Microsoft Azure in just 10 minutes, or less. |